Grow Your Own

     Don't ask me why but I picked up a book on tractors.  Never owned one, no idea how to operate one, and no idea why the book attracted me like...well, like a tractor beam.  Maybe it was title: From John Deere to Lamborghini.  Wait, what??  Or maybe it was that naive thought of spending my later years in the country, grow a few veggies, chat with the nearest farmer ten miles down the road, hang out a Trump 2028 flag.  Okay, snap out of it.  Who was I kidding?  First of all, I'd starve, or worse if that pump to the well broke or that "cute" horse I bought for a song and a dance was one mean mare ready for the pasture and was having no part of my city-boy antics.  But then look at those tires.  Wait, I'm not being misogynistic because I still am talking about tractors here.  But what's with that younger, slimmer, no baggy eyelids Trump posing with a young Army cadet in the Oval Office?  Well I had to get your attention somehow because who wants to read a post about tractors?  But have you ever seen Trump beaming like he's living a fantasy?  Why the whole backdrop seems unreal, as if Trump made it all up.  Uh, he did, and I'll get back to that later.  But now that you're paying attention, let's get back to those tractors...

     The book by Jonathan Whitlam has no table of contents or index, and only a one-page intro, which tells you that tractors originated in Britain, but became quite refined on coming to America.  Now don't get all huffy about all that because it all had to do with the soil.  The firmer land in the US allowed heavier and more powerful tractors to break away from the original steam-powered versions favored in the UK.  And if you can only recite John Deere and International Harvester (which was a consortium of five companies), and maybe Caterpillar as the known manufacturers of tractors, join the club...but then there was also Ford (one of the original tractor designers named Fordson), Renault, Fiat, Volvo, Mercedes Benz, Belarus from the USSR (which made sense because they were one of the largest producers of wheat), and of course, Lamborghini which was --ready?-- an established tractor producer before becoming known for its cars.  Tractors now can have tank-like quad "wheels," reach 1000 horsepower, be driverless, and also come in front or 4-wheel drive.  That GPS stuff is now old-hat.  Who knew?  Hey, stop that yawning in back...

      Without trying to join the doomers club, let's take a few what-if situations.  What if you lost your job and now faced a load of debt?  What if the market crashed and you lost fully half of what you had in there?  What if you had little to no savings or family to lend you money?  What if you were working but stuck with a commute in your giant SUV that once looked pretty snazzy but now sets you back $75 each week to fill up?  What if you or someone in your family needed something that your insurance didn't cover, or that you had just stopped paying your premiums because the ACA subsidies expired?  Okay, cut it out (hopefully you're not there yet, although some may be nearing that point).  My step father, who rarely talked about his childhood growing up on a farm, did tell me that during the days of the Great Depression, when a large chunk of the country (and elsewhere in the world) was indeed out of work and standing in soup lines (and one should note that those bad times lasted 10 years!), that they did fine, their chickens and what they grew allowing them to barter for goods as well as keep food on the table.  But plop me into one or more of the above situations and I'd likely be the one in the soup line, my meager efforts to grow something turning quickly into a failed hobby rather than something which would feed me or anyone else for months (how many tomatoes and zucchini can a person eat?)   Let's face it, most of us have a dreamlike version of how food arrives from the field to our grocery shelves, or even what's involved in growing and harvesting a crop of anything, from potatoes to milk (how do you raise, roundup, clean and milk hundreds of dairy cows?)   Here's the 80-acre farm you won, and here's the tractor...go.

     All this talk about growing our food and having to can it sends most of us grudgingly back to the grocery store where even the simple things such as cans of cat food have skyrocketed to triple the price of what they were just a year or so ago.  As the saying goes, once a price goes up it doesn't come down.  The "sale" prices are now just the old prices, as if manufacturers feel that we consumers have little to no memory of that and that we'll "absorb" the higher prices without question (and we sort of do).  Blame it on the higher cost of gas, or fertilizer, or packaging, or tariffs, or shipping, or higher wages in general say the producers (okay, forget that one about higher wages because anyone actually doing grunt work knows what a myth that is) but the fact is that things are indeed more expensive at the grocery store.  So imagine my surprise at reading this in Barron's: Kraft-Heinz is down more than 40% over the past three years, not counting dividends, and General Mills, Campbell's, and Conagra Brands around 60% apiece.  What?  How can that be when we zillions of consumers are paying so much more for our groceries?  So the article did show a few companies showing increased valuations : AtniBeckley (up 212%), Compass Pathways (up 134%), and Definium Therapeutics (up 283%), each adding psychedelics such as ayahuasca, psilocybin and LSD to their hoped-for FDA approval for treating different ailments.  Their estimated market value so far?  Close to $36 billion (each has shown no profits to date).  If you thought Trump's accounting was a giant maze, try delving into those grocery and pharmaceutical aisles...

      Yet in comparing data from the Department of Labor back in 2008 to today, author Kathleen Flinn wrote in her book, Kitchen Counter Cooking School: American consumers are generally unaware that they spend less of their wages on food than any other country in the world; just under 10% of their paychecks.  Compare that to 1900, when 40 percent of wages went toward food.  Around 1960, the first time the amount spent on food was no longer the biggest expenditure, the figure was about 24 percent.  The declining cost comes with the rise of industrialization of farming practices and the shift of everything we eat --from pigs to cows to orange juice-- into mass-produced merchandise...as a country we collectively waste about 40 percent of the food produced for consumption.  She notes that while some crops sit unharvested, and some are discarded by grocery stores, the majority of food (25-30%) is wasted at our homes, a figure some estimate at $100 billlion worth.  

Photo: Dung Hoang

       My wife and I talk about moving somewhere, mainly into a single-level home.  We love our house of 37 years but it has stairs everywhere and in coming years will prove a challenge.  And what with rising pollution, drought, and a big jump in urban population, we're not sure that we want to stay in Utah.  So where would you go, asked a friend.  We love the Cornish coast in England (my wife's childhood home) but the national healthcare in the UK is abysmal, say friends living there (but we wouldn't be alone...the recent Barron's wrote that Social Security paid out checks to nearly 465,000 ex-pats last year, a jump of nearly 7%; politics in the US and seeking a lower cost of living virtually tied as the top two reasons for moving out of the US).  So where?  Somewhere in the country, away from it all, you know, freshly laid eggs, clean air, friendly neighbors, home cooking.  Yeah right...I don't even know the basics of canning, even though my folks did it all the time.  Canned Heat wrote: I'm gonna leave the city, got to get away.  All this fussin' and fightin', man, you know I sure can't stay...Just exactly where we're goin' I cannot say, but we might even leave the USA 'cause there's a brand-new game that I don't wanna play.  It was a play on words back when the only canned heat commercially was something called Sterno (think of those small canisters under buffet platters), and then came Vietnam and napalm (a blend of na-phthenic- and palmitic-acids = na-palm)* and suddenly sticky gels that clung to you like honey --and were on fire-- were not so camping-oriented anymore (although banned against the use of civilians long ago, the US did not agree to this section of the treaty and continues to use a version of incendiary gels in its bombs).  But it shows how easily we can block such images out and "pretend" that all is well, that peaceful life is all that exists in the country and that our fields of barley would grow just as we imagined once we moved there, that is until we hear that, "Ernie, go get me a chicken" or "here's the rifle; time to put old Bessie down."

     

     There's something to be said about such images of how we want things to be, such as the image on the right.  This female officer is an AI creation of Trump for his social media page, meant to please that fracturing manosphere of his MAGA followers.  Perhaps Trump created this young fantasy lady to take him back to his Jeffrey Epstein days, who knows?  But Trump's AI-generated Jessica Foster (the name he gave his creation) has appeared in over 50 photos, even next to Trump meeting Putin, and already has over a million Instagram followers,.  Wrote researcher Sam Gregory, Trump's created Foster is: ...the apotheosis of what MAGA fantasizes about, all packed into one channel.  For the rest of us, that is those of us interested in images that are real, Trump has ordered a blackout of satellite photos from Iran and the Gulf States, wrote WIRED, perhaps to hide alleged damage being done to US bases and communication systems by Iran's drones.  

     But those AI-photos of Jessica are not the only angelic images we "foster."  Author Francis Spufford, in his creative novel Nonesuch, had one character --a Hogwarts-like eccentric-- describe how humans perhaps incorrectly view an angel: I believe you are being mislead, my dear, by the conventional iconography.  The wings, the colored robe, the sweet and girlish face -- Victorian paraphernalia, obscuring a forgotten reality.  Our ancestors knew better.  If you read the, ah, Enochian writings, or for that matter in Paracelsus, you glimpse there a more, ah, feral truth, in which the angelidae, considered as a class, descend through many degrees from the Greater Powers, whom only the greatest of adepts might dare to approach, all the way down to a far more lowly and numerous category of aerial spirits, denizens only of the lower part of the atmosphere.  Crude, limited, yet still immensely powerful in human terms.  The, as you might say, proletariat of the angelic species.  It was similar to Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 novel, Childhood's End, in which enough time had to pass that we could shed our preconceptions and realize that there existed good "demons."

     Barbara Ehrenreich sought to dispel another engrained image, subtitling her book "How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America."  One reviewer summed it up this way: Barbara Ehrenreich's skeptical common sense is just what we need to penetrate the cloying fog that passes for happiness in America.  Wrote Ehrenreich: All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will.  You have to be sure...Without a doubt, throughout our several hundred thousand years of existence on earth, humans have also been guided by superstition, mystical visions, and collective delusions of all sorts.  But we got where we are, fanning out over the huge continent of Africa and from there all over the earth, through the strength of the knots we could tie, the sturdiness of shelters and boats, the sharpness of spearheads.  Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things "as they are," or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions.

    We all carry images of what we think lies ahead: moving to the country or a farm, angels and demons, an early retirement and lower gas prices, being slimmer and younger and posing with an adoring young lady.  But as John Lennon once wrote: Everybody's runnin' and no one makes a move; everyone's a winner and nothing left to lose...everybody's flying and no one leaves the ground; everybody's crying and no one makes a sound...nobody told me there'd be days like these.  Strange days indeed.  On his personal page Lennon added: I look at it all and think, ‘Ah, well, I have to deal with me again in that way.  What is real?  What is the illusion I’m living or not living?’  And I have to deal with it every day.  The layers of the onion.  But that is what it’s all about.  We think we have the right, and not the duty, but we have the ‘something’ to have a say in the future.  And we think the future is made in your mind.  Double Fantasy, as his album came to be called...

 

    Narsiso Martinez also tries to break through some of our hidden images, using discarded packing boxes and crates thrown behind stores to show the farm workers and harvesters who tirelessly work behind the scenes.  Just consider the many others: the housekeepers paid to dust and vacuum houses around the country, the gardeners paid to tend endless lawns, the farmworkers forever bending over to pick lettuce and other ground crops, the invisible people cleaning bathrooms at airports and office buildings.  The blackout in Iran.  The list goes on and on.  To read the best-selling book The Secret, or to listen to the once-popular talk show host Oprah Winfrey, visualize something with enough positive thinking and it will come to you.  Illusions or delusions?  Perhaps with Trump and his Jessica, they are one and the same.  Perhaps Francis Spufford titled his fantasy book NoneSuch because it exists, no matter how you think it.  But take heed of the words of one who Trump probably also fantasizes about and admires, Niccolò Machiavelli: The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often even more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are...

Painting on discarded packing boxes: Nasiso Martinez

*The sticky gel incendiaries used by the militaries around the world are far different than the rather mild buffet-heating gels.  For one, they are mixed with a more liquid fuel that's gasoline-like, and the acidic mixtures burn thousands of degrees hotter, not only burning through skin almost immediately but if spread widely, such as through thin-layered bombs, suck the oxygen out of the air.  This was the purpose in targeting caves and bunkers, to both heat and asphyxiate whatever was inside.  Leave it to human nature to find ever "better" ways of hurting others, including vegetation and animals caught in the blast.  Such liquid incendiaries were already being used in warfare by the early 1900s...

Addendum: Since it's difficut to throw everything into a post and have it still make sense (at least in my mind), I decided to add this quick refresher on Niccolò Machiavelli --and the term Machiavellian-- way at the bottom.  He wrote The Prince, thought to be a discourse on how he felt his government was veering off course in his time period of 1532 (the book was published after his death).  Here's how Wikipedia summarized a portion of that book: ...He concerned himself with the ways a ruler could succeed in politics, and believed those who flourished engaged in deception, treachery, and violence.  He advised rulers to engage in evil when political necessity requires it, for example, stating that successful founders and reformers of governments should be excused for killing their political enemies.  Machiavelli's Prince has been surrounded by controversy since it was published.  Some consider it to be a straightforward description of political reality.  Many view The Prince as a manual, teaching would-be tyrants how they should seize and maintain power.  So jump forward to today and take a guess as to who said the following: ...to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have?  You have nothing.  You are nothing.  You are wickedness.  You are jealously.  You are envy.  You are hatred.  You are nothing.  You can build nothing.  You can produce nothing.  You can create nothing...And what will you leave behind?  Nothing.  Nothing.  To our enemies: you have nothing to give.  You have nothing to offer.  You have nothing to share but bitterness.  If you guessed that those words came from Trump when speaking about Iran, you'd again be pulled into Trump's fantasy world.  Those words actually came from the one who continues to be credited with operating Trump's puppet strings, Stephen Miller.  As for me, I much prefer these words: I never had an idea in my life.  I've got no imagination.  I never dream.  My so-called inventions already existed in the environment -- I took them out.  I've created nothing.  Nobody does.  And who said those words about creating nothing and having nothing?  Thomas Edison...